


left behind

by theredhoodie



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Alternate 1x09, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-05
Updated: 2016-04-05
Packaged: 2018-05-31 08:56:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6463909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theredhoodie/pseuds/theredhoodie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sara and Leonard stared up at the Waverider as it tore off into the sky, leaving them in a swirl of dust and snow. </p><p>"Where are they going?" Leonard asked, his words a snarl of annoyance.</p><p>Sara swallowed hard, something dark and heavy settling on her. "More importantly, why did they leave us?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	left behind

**Author's Note:**

> So this grew out of a tumblr prompt on my Captain Canary blog, and I loved it so much that it got REALLY long and I decided to post it here. 
> 
> I apologize for any typos. I will edit through it soon!

Sara was never lucky in love. Boyfriends and girlfriends when she was younger…Oliver Queen…Nyssa…and then she died and it all went to shit. She was determined not to feel again, at least not like that. She wasn’t going to let herself get that deep emotionally with another person again. It hurt…she wasn’t used to the emotions that the Lazarus Pit had wiped clean from her memory. One little kiss from Lindsay in 1958 and she had begun to unspool.

And then it was her and Leonard, stuck in the past together with no other companions. Both of them loners, and yet neither of them could part ways from the other. Something kept drawing them back.

Two years past. They became shadows in the night—masked vigilantes who did good things but not always in good ways. They were close to the first masked crusaders. They had to do _something_ because the team wasn’t coming back for them. Why would they—they were just the crook and the assassin, after all.

And then the impossible happened: the team came back. Sara and Len were dragged back into the world of time travel and fighting Chronos while trying to figure out where to attack Savage.

The others were happy to have them back—at least Sara was greeted warmly, while Len got a respectable apology from Rip and a clap on his shoulder from Ray that almost got the billionaire iced—but the two of them were dealing with their own swirl of emotion. 

They didn’t have any time to process before Chronos was attacking the ship. The hours blurred into chaos as they tumbled through time, the team split apart. By the time they got back together in the middle of a field in Feudal Japan, Sara was smashed in the chest with gut wrenching feelings at the sight of Leonard: nursing a blackened stub of a wrist, his best friend knocked out and in shackles.

Two hours later, when Leonard had his hand back and Mick was awake and in a containment cell, the Waverider took it upon itself to stay cloaked and leave Gideon time to repair before they left again.

She lingered in the room as the others left, but still exited the room before Leonard. She crossed her arms tightly across her chest and tried to walk down the hall as slowly as humanly possible. The others were tired from the fight and all moved off to their own bunks. She hated the weight of ice in her stomach and knew it meant she had to talk to Leonard, even though he wasn’t going to be in the best of moods thanks to what had gone down. 

Eventually he left the room, the door sliding open. He stalked out and walked with a steady, fast pace down the hall. He didn’t even stop when he passed her. 

“Len,” she said, unfurling her arms. 

“Don’t,” he said, moving away from her instinctively even though he had gotten quite used to her touch over the past two years. “Not right now.”

“Well, tough.” Sara followed him, fisting her hands lightly at her sides. “I need to talk to you.” 

“I need to sleep.” He flexed his new hand, marveling at how alien and familiar it felt. She couldn’t even imagine how it must feel to have lost a limb and had it grown back in a matter of minutes.

“We need to talk about what happened,” she said bluntly as his room came into view.

He came to an abrupt halt in front of the door and it slid open for him, revealing a dark space that quickly lit up. “What happened, happened in the 50’s. There’s nothing to talk about,” he said, his tone telling her that he wanted that to be the end of the conversation.

Sara wasn’t having any of that. She followed him inside defiantly, the door closing them into the small, personal space. “Nothing at all?” She wasn’t about to start crying and getting weepy, but that hurt. It _stung_.

He tightened his jaw; she could see the muscles move across his jaw as he clenched his teeth. “Sara.” He said her name flatly, like he was trying to convince himself that the last two years really were nothing but circumstance.

“Seriously?” She huffed and held her arms out to either side. 

Circumstance had _influenced_ something that had already started. It was organic, the way they saw something in each other at the beginning on Rip’s insane mission, and it just grew into something more because what else did they have?

They were tossed out of time. Sara wouldn’t let Leonard steal from anywhere that would give them enough cash to live a _great_ life, so they lived on the low and had to work legit jobs during the day to pay meager bills. They donned outfits to mar their faces from any late night photographers and stopped muggers and would-be rapists and other felons with nasty desires. They’d string them up for the cops and disappear before they themselves could be caught.

Leonard sighed, hands on his waist as he turned to face her. She had her hair pulled back so her whole face was visible. Sara was used to having a mutual respect between the two of them, never doing something the other didn’t want, and yet here they were.

“That all happened,” he motioned toward the door, “out there. We were just playing roles.” 

“Were we?” Sara shook her head and fisted her hands again. “I didn’t think we would ever be back on this ship. I was fully fucking prepared to stay _out there_. And I would have stayed with you. We had…good things going on.”

She wished she could see into his head. To see just how much he wasn’t saying, to see what he was feeling. His face was good at neutral, and it left her guessing. 

“Sure.” He neglected to make the word flat.

It didn’t cover the warm lips and cold hands, the moans and whispers in the dark, the emotionally driven conversations afterward.

Sara walked up to him until their feet were nearly touching. She was much shorter than him and tilted her head back, yet still managed to make him feel small. Or so she gathered from the flash of surprise in his eyes.

“Say you never loved me.” The words came from that raw part of herself that was sore from his words, from the sight of him sweaty and broken from his time with Mick…Chronos. “Not even a little, in your cold as ice way?” 

They never discussed love, but love came in many different forms and the twisted knife in her gut told her there was love here. Maybe not the kind she had with Nyssa, but it was there. And stepping aboard a space ship after two years of it wasn’t going to just magically make it disappear.

Leonard let out a puff of air and closed his eyes. “Sara,” he said, opening his eyes partly.

“Be honest with me, Leonard.”

The first time they kissed had been after their first night out as vigilantes. They were both roughed up, but they collapsed on the living room floor from exhaustion and adrenaline. Sara started to laugh first and then Len followed. It didn’t take much for her to lean over and kiss him. And then she was on top of him, pinning him to the floor and it just tumbled into place. His hands sliding down her sides to her waist, her hips, her thighs. They broke the coffee table when he rolled her onto her back—it was an accident that they fixed with glue and screws so it was always there as a reminder—and clothes had come off until Sara gasped from him brushing across a wound they had missed: base of her skull, hair matted with blood. He cleaned her hair and made sure she got into bed, but not before she grabbed his shirt and kissed him again. 

In front of her, his breathing got shaky. “Don’t make me say that.” He looked at her then, her eyes wide and searching, her vulnerability laid out in front of her like she rarely did. “Don’t ask me to say that I don’t love you.”

His words caught the air in her throat. She almost hated herself for it. Here was Leonard Snart, Mr. I-only-care-about-myself-and-money, who cared so deeply about his sister, about Mick Rory, yet who didn’t let people in. He didn’t allow himself to love anyone, because love only hurt.

“I can’t just pretend like the last two years didn’t happen,” Sara said after the beat drew out between them, warming the air. “It’s not…in me to do that. You…you really helped me come to terms with who I am in that time and I can’t let that go.”

Len swallowed and blinked so he didn’t have to keep holding her gaze.

“And I don’t want you to have to lose anyone else,” she added, reaching out her hand. Her fingers brushed against the back of his hand. He didn’t jump or flinch, but she allowed him to decide. Slowly, his hand turned and their fingers slid between each other. “Being back here, on this mission…it changes things. We can figure this shit out, okay?”

“Don’t lock me out,” Leonard said, his voice remarkably soft.

In another time, she would have made a convincing quip about him being a damn good thief, but she found herself not wanting to even put that thought in his mind. “I won’t if you won’t.” She stepped a bit closer.

He nodded. Sara lifted her other hand and rested it against his jaw before going up on her toes and kissing him softly, a reminder that two years wasn’t going to just go down the drain. She wouldn’t let it, she didn’t want it. She wanted to help him help Mick, she wanted to catch Vandal Savage, she wanted to keep the control she had over her bloodlust. And to do that, she needed to make sure Leonard was at her side, that he was willing to _give_ a little.

They both needed each other two much. They were too cracked to keep themselves together without help.

 


End file.
